It was the Yanks’ turn to deliver the daily devotional. In a scene reminiscent of Family Feud, Don, a contestant representing the Blackburn family, was sent to the front of the bus, amid much fraternal cheerleading, high-fiving, and back-patting.
Don spoke of the repetition of names in The Book of Mormon. For example, there are multiple characters named Nephi, which gets terribly confusing. But the takeaway from these name sequels, he suggested, is that history unfolds very slowly—very, very slowly. “Sometimes it takes three Nephis, spread out over a thousand years, just to get something small done.” This struck me as a wise interpretation, the kind earned the hard way by a guy who comes from a big, unruly family.
After we finished the daily prayer, Don quietly returned to his seat. For a brief moment our group fell into silent meditation. This was rare for us. We could hear raindrops gently falling on the roof of the bus. But the quiet was immediately broken when one of Don’s numerous beefy brothers catapulted him back to the front. “Do it!” the brother shouted. This was all it took for the entire Blackburn clan to begin chanting “Do it, do it, do it!”
“Okay, fine,” said Don, standing again at the head of the bus. He took a deep breath. “Rencerella,” he began. “Murdy ugler sad twine bad blisters … and they rell in fur …”
“It’s a pig latin version of Cinderella,” one of the Utah Blackburns was whispering to me.
It was odd and somewhat disillusioning to hear the man who’d just led us in solemn prayer now spouting absolute gibberish—but that’s how life is sometimes. As it turned out, Don was doing the long version of Rencerella; it went on for upwards of four traffic lights and two left turns. As we pulled into our destination, the ruins of the ancient City of Nephi, located on the outskirts of Guatemala City, he was reaching the finale. Even as we exited the bus, Don was saying into the microphone, “Okay, guys, so the lesson is, before you baney fill, don’t forget to slop your dripper!”
The one thing the great City of Nephi didn’t resemble was a city. The most immediate impression was of an off-kilter golf course. The site of the great Maya capital, Kaminaljuyú, was now a large field of bright, freshly cut grass that rose and fell every few feet in steep groundswells created by centuries of collected soil deposited around the city buildings. Today only the rounded green silhouettes of the towers’ tops are visible, like toes under a blanket.
As we stood next to one of these mounds, Lee read to us from The Book of Mormon. Some of us were stirred by this recitation. Others were beginning to feel sunburned and dehydrated. The clouds looked succulent and deliciously chilly. A cloud shaped exactly like a human brain, complete with cerebellum and medulla, was slowly but steadily floating away. Suddenly the whole group was looking at the sky. For a moment the heavens darkened and swarmed.
“Vultures,” whispered Uncle Ian.
“Oh gee, would ya look at that?” said Lee, using his tattered copy of The Book of Mormon to shield his eyes. “Everyone make sure to drink some water.”
We entered one of the mounds through a tunnel. Most of the ancient buildings had already been excavated, but the archaeologists had since resealed the dig and allowed the soil and grass to grow in order to preserve the site. Since they’d also built a large shelter over the dig site, a strange darkness prevailed within—it was as if we’d walked into the City of Nephi in the middle of the night. The effect was of an atmospherically lit stage set of a city alley. To the untrained eye, the ancient city didn’t look all that different from Bible-era Jerusalem. It wasn’t hard to imagine Nephi hanging out here. Through cracks overhead, shafts of light illumined isolated spots of the ancient street—a set of large, stunningly well preserved steps, a small tub of some sort, the outer walls of buildings, windows, exposed rooms, more stairs leading down to even deeper chambers. Assorted statue heads lay on the curb, as though awaiting a garbage collection. Lee suddenly materialized on a balcony structure overhead and explained that Nephi completed his temple in America around 570 BCE, the same period as Preclassic Maya temples discovered here.
All over the ruin, the pilgrims busily created personal records, capturing the painterly contours of light pouring in, the odd insects crawling around, or the architectural markers that Lee was relating to The Book of Mormon. Each person was collecting the information differently, interpreting it differently, presenting it to others differently. Even if our job was to blaze The Book of Mormon trail, people were finding their own ways of doing it. The power of the pilgrimage was exactly that: both in documenting the big official narrative and in finding a way to make that narrative personal.
Back on the bus, the Aussies compared sunburns. Maggie took a seat next to me, pulled out her sketchbook, and began making some touch-ups. She had elaborated on her drawings from our jungle excursion yesterday in Tikal, adding little figures, Star Wars guys, battling each other. Sitting in front of us, Uncle Hugh had also spied out Maggie’s sketches and had, in his fashion, run a finger over one of the pages.
“Love that paper,” he said. “High quality.”
Underneath the cartoon panels Maggie had carefully inscribed, in an elegant lettering, verses from The Book of Mormon: “And I, Nephi, did take the sword of Laban, and after the manner of it did make many swords …”
Among Book of Mormon readers, I most enjoyed talking to the sci-fi obsessives, the gamers and fantasy role-players. They, the nerds, not the jocks or preppies, seemed to really get it. In their dweebish intensity, they seemed to understand what this journey was all about. Intuitively Maggie knew why both Star Wars and Book of Mormon stories played out on the temple structures built by Maya kings with names like Spear-Thrower Owl.
Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd, explains why tech nerds often gravitate to certain modes of storytelling, namely sci-fi and fantasy fiction. Science fiction and fantasy stories are, at their core, a type of experimental technology, he says. These kinds of stories are animated by “the mechanics of the situation.” Writes Nugent: “A large part of the fun of reading a sci-fi series is about inputting a particular set of variables (dragon-on-dragon without magic) into a model (the Napoleonic Wars) and seeing what kind of output you get.”
Maybe something similar was happening here on the Nephite lands tour. We were proposing an earnest experiment, the creation of a narrative made out of existing pieces that offered the kind of satisfaction a DIY techie gets from fashioning a functioning system, from tooling around, taking something apart and putting it back together in a new way, then watching it do something new and exciting. If you work out the technical details and the thing really does function, it means it’s a good system, no matter how weird the premise. Were the gold plates inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs by Preclassic Maya people? Why not? Was it possible that they were edited by one of those men, Mormon, the scion of an ancient Israelite family from Jerusalem, in Veracruz, Mexico, and given to his son, Moroni, to bury in what would eventually be known as the greater Rochester area? Let’s make it happen.
Why be biased? We were simply inputting a set of variables (ancient sea voyage from Middle East to Mesoamerica, Israelites inhabiting Maya civilization, seer stones, angels) into a model (the biblical narrative and American history) and observing the output.
At the moment, from the window of our tour bus, this output looked like a magnificent fertile valley, with waterfalls and deep, mysterious caverns and a jungle fog thick enough to sustain any idea you might imagine. Which was why we, Book of Mormon readers, dove into our backpacks to retrieve our cameras the moment Lee got on the mic and excitedly told us to look out our windows and behold the valley that lay before us, for it was none other than the Land of Mormon.
A few hours before sundown we arrived at the Waters of Mormon, more commonly known as Lake Atitlán. The dark green-black, black-purple light of the surrounding country permeated the lake, making the water look silken and regal. Three steeplelike volcanoes, perfectly spaced along its sides, gave the landscape an elegant symmetry. You took one look at those volcanoes and you knew immediately that they have been considered sacred for as long as people have set eyes on them, that they probably created the concept of sacredness in the minds of those who first saw them.
The landscape here was wide open; you could tell it your own way. There were endless ways to spin the story of walking into Maya Kaminaljuyú and finding the City of Nephi in it, of arriving at Lake Atitlán and seeing the Waters of Mormon there—and we were still among the first ones to give it a try.
According to Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of the Kabbalah, that openness, in fact, is the definition of a prophetic text: a story that can generate endless meanings, endless interpretations, a story that isn’t limited in time or place to one particular interpretation and that is frankly weird and plastic and unrealistic enough—yet also plausible enough—for all readings of it to be simultaneously true. (His modern example was Kafka.) Despite a history of dogmatic readings, prophetic stories are those that actually push against dogmatic reading. That’s what makes them perpetually relevant.
As the days went by, as we continued to trace out our map and examine artifacts, and as I watched different kinds of readings happening all around me—many of which were also being simultaneously recorded—I felt as though I really were watching a prophetic text in the making, that we really were traveling through the lands of Joseph’s book, the places he’d seen so vividly, though never actually visited. The process that Joseph began was still evolving, and seemed, actually, to be just getting interesting.